It's official: 2012 hottest year on record

You've probably read news reports yesterday and today stating that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States. You can find NOAA's original release here. Here's part of the discussion:

The above-average temperatures of spring continued into summer. The national-scale heat peaked in July with an average temperature of 76.9°F, 3.6°F above average, making it the hottest month ever observed for the contiguous United States. The eighth warmest June, record hottest July, and a warmer-than-average August resulted in a summer average temperature of 73.8°F, the second hottest summer on record by only hundredths of a degree. An estimated 99.1 million people experienced 10 or more days of summer temperatures greater than 100°F, nearly one-third of the nation’s population.

 Just how hot was it?  Climate Central has developed an interactive graphic showing the changing temperature in each state. The screen shot shows a graph of Iowa's increasing temperatures over the years since records have begun (yes, I know the graph should start at 0 (or 32, since we're talking about temperatures measured in Fahrenheit, but I'm letting it go in this case).
 
2012 was also the second-most tempestuous year. According to NOAA:

The U.S. Climate Extremes Index indicated that 2012 was the second most extreme year on record for the nation. The index, which evaluates extremes in temperature and precipitation, as well as landfalling tropical cyclones, was nearly twice the average value and second only to 1998. To date, 2012 has seen 11 disasters that have reached the $1 billion threshold in losses, to include Sandy, Isaac, and tornado outbreaks experienced in the Great Plains, Texas and Southeast/Ohio Valley.

Amazing photos from National Geographic's photo contest

(one example in the screenshot) are available here (via The Atlantic). There are some amazing photos there, so click through!

Turning files into art

Null_sets is an effort by artist/educator Evan Meaney to explore the gap between data and information. Visually. You take a file - it can be text or a picture - of different lengths, and plug it into the convenient onscreen script, here. You'll be sent to the flickr stream for your results.

Here are my tweet of yesterday's blog post, and a slightly longer file:

Looking ahead: all the data you need for 2013

From the Guardian's data blog, here are links to the data you'll need for office pools in 2013 (well, not the March madness one). Oscar winners? Look at the Golden Globe nominations. UEFA Champions League final? There is a graph showing which clubs the top 100 players come from. The sex of the royal baby? Well, there's no data but at least you can look at the odds before you bet. There's more: Portuguese bond redemption and interest payments are due in September, so the column examines government debt compared to GDP. And that's not to mention the Booker Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize.

NYC's 311 Map

That's a visualization of the 1,551,402 contacts New York City's 311 system received in 2012 - by phone, text, and online. New York City's Open Data project has posted the video. There are other visualizations available here.

Obesity studies

You may have read yesterday about a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluding that, although obesity overall was associated with higher mortality rates, overweight (identified by Body Mass Index, or BMI) was associated with statistically significant lower mortality rates. This conclusion has been trumpeted as vindication for the view that we are, perhaps, overfocused on the importance of weight loss for good health. See, for example, here, here, and here.

This conclusion depends, of course, on BMI being a good proxy for mortality risk. There's some evidence that it's not. One drawback, according to Well-Being Wire, is that BMI fails to account for an individual's exercise habits - you can be fit but fit with a high BMI, and slender but sedentary with a low BMI. In those cases, BMI won't tell you who is healthier.

In any case, the study is not an endorsement of heaviness or weight gain. The authors conclude: 

Relative to normal weight, obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were both associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity was not associated with higher mortality, suggesting that the excess mortality in obesity may predominantly be due to elevated mortality at higher BMI levels.

And even the next sentence, "Overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality," needs to be read with some skepticism. As Lindsay Abrams writes at TheAtlantic's web site:

the study fails to take into account any of the various other measures used to assess health. It ignores blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol -- high levels of all are directly associated with a variety of chronic conditions and diseases -- not to mention mental health and life satisfaction scores.  

She provides some interesting pictures that make the point about BMI, and concludes:

While in the most basic of ways, it makes sense to pay attention to the number on the scale, it only gives us one metric of health that, if not understood in context, is basically useless. If we could get used to looking at weight more holistically, in terms of overall health, the link between BMI and longevity wouldn't be so shocking.

So read the study. Think about it. And then continue to work out.

Striking images from 2012

Here's a link to Climate Central's photo album from 2012. And one very striking image from the set:

Happy New Year!